H-ASIA
November 3, 2005
Comment on Popular History and Bunkum -- on *1421, The Year China Discovered
America*
*****************************************************************
From: Jennifer Purtle <jgpurtle@gmail.com>
Dear H-Asia Members,
With reference to Geoff Wade’s post of October 21:
As an art historian who works, among other things, on cultural
geography and the material apparatus of geography in China, I read with some
interest Geoff Wade's complaint against Transworld Publishers, and the ten
points that Wade makes against Gavin Menzies’ _1421: The Year China Discovered
America_.
In particular, point #6 caught my attention.
“6. Claim: The Chinese Œwere aware that the earth was a globe and had divided
it into 365 and a quarter degrees (the number of days in the year) of latitude
and longitude.” (*1421*, p. 449)
“Fact: There is no evidence that during the early Ming, the Chinese had any
knowledge of the earth as a globe and certainly none that they were aware of
latitude and longitude.”
I have not seen the book published in Leiden that Hilde de Weerdt cited in her
response, so this may be old news to many, but there is a rather specific
description of a strange bauble manufactured at the Yuan court circa 1272 under
the auspices of the Persian astronomer Jamal-ud-Din (about which I¹m currently
writing an article). The passage appears in the Yuan shi 48:999, complied
under the aegis of Song Lian (1310-1381) during the early Ming period. A
workmanlike, draft translation of the Yuan shi text ‹which is well worth a look
in the original (!) --might read:
“The Ku-lai-yi-a-er-zi [perhaps the geographer Al-Biruni¹s (973-1048)
_Al-Athar Al-Baqiyah fi Qanum Al-Khaliyah_, a work of ancient history and
geography of circa 995 CE-- only the last part Khaliyah is perhaps
transliterated as Ku-lai-yi-a, and erzi used to represent the al – “son of,”
“of the clan of”] is the Chinese Dili zhi Geographic Record]. Its manufacture
was effected by taking wood and making it into a round ball, seven parts
represented water, the color of which was green, three parts represented land,
the color of which was white. It delineated (hua) rivers, lakes, oceans;
greater and lesser arteries (literally blood vessels) are strung around its
middle. Lines (hua) makes small square grids, to measure the area of the
sphere, and the distance of the roads.”
This odd ball thing was not without precedent ‹ its postdates by a bit more
than a hundred years the first known object of its kind, created by the
geographer Idrisi (born in Ceuta, Spain) active at the court of Roger II in
Sicily prior to Idrisi’s death in 1166. Also, the gridding of the Odd Ball
perhaps matches discursive conventions of Arabic geography. The Syrian
geographer Abulfeda (1273-1331), in the entry for Quanzhou in his Geography
(which I¹ve only read in Reinaud¹s translation), for example, begins:
"...Quanzhou. According to Ibn Said (fl. 13th cent.), 154º longitude and 17º
latitude....² (Reinaud, _La Géographie d’Aboulfeda_, v. 2, p. 123). This
convention is not unique to Abulfeda, but is found elsewhere in Arabic
geography of the period and earlier. Indeed, Al-Biruni, whose work the Odd Ball
Thing may literally embody, wrote about a spherical earth that rotated on an
axis (and orbited the sun), and Al-Biruni was known for his accurate
calculations of latitude and longitude, relative position, and the radius of
the earth (this last not matched in the West until the 16th century).
Personally, I¹d love to teach the Yuan shi passage in a Classical Chinese
class, just for fun, to see what students think the Odd Ball might be! The
passage has so many of the basic grammatical structures AB ye, yi X wei Y (take
and make), the use of fen for tenths, nice parallelisms, pretty straightforward
vocabulary -- would be great on a first year exam!
What this Odd Ball may or may not have meant to those who encountered it (and
how many of them there may or may not have been, and when) is hard to say; who
could have recognized the object firsthand or in its textual description is
unclear to me (could the non-Chinese intellectual élite that made the Thing
under Mongol rule understand its literary Chinese description? Could the
Chinese description adequately express the foreign ideas of the object for an
ethnic Chinese/Sinophone audience? Do the “Lines that make small square grids”
(Hua zuo xiao fang jing) that gridded the surface of this thing represent a
period idea of ‘longitude’ and ‘latitude’?
They have that visual form, but what do they represent epistemologically?)
They don¹t fit Dava Sobel¹s account of John Harrison’s (and our modern) idea of
longitude and how it was ‘discovered’ exactly. But they don¹t appear altogether
unrelated, either (especially if the wooden ball is a material representation
of Al-Biruni’s text(s).) Hypothetically, could a period viewer get from point A
to point B based on the information of this Odd Ball Thing? On land? By sea?
Both? Neither? Hmmm...
I am no particular fan of Menzies, just have a lot of questions about the
strange things made at the Yuan court and recorded in the early Ming.
Jennifer Purtle
University of Toronto
(From 1 January 2006)
jenny.purtle@utoronto.ca
formerly The University of Chicago
(position resigned 1 July 2005)
Coming soon: “1994, the year Asian Scholars First Discovered H-ASIA”